Alphabet's Latest X Project Is a Crop-Sniffing Plant Buggy (theverge.com) 31
Alphabet's X lab has officially announced its latest "moonshot": a computational agriculture project the company is calling Mineral. The Verge reports: The project is focused on sustainable food production and farming at large scales, with a focus on "developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics and more," according to project lead Elliott Grant. A blog post outlining the project's vision says Mineral, which now has an official name but may have launched in secret around 2017 according to Grant's LinkedIn page, will try and aim technology toward solving issues around sustainability. Those include feeding of Earth's growing population, and producing crops more efficiently by understanding growth cycles and weather patterns. The project will also hope to manage land and plant life as the effects of climate change complicate ecosystems.
"Just as the microscope led to a transformation in how diseases are detected and managed, we hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown," explains Grant. "Over the last few years my team and I have been developing the tools of what we call computational agriculture, in which farmers, breeders, agronomists, and scientists will lean on new types of hardware, software, and sensors to collect and analyze information about the complexity of the plant world." One of the first of these tools is a new four-wheel rover-like prototype, what the Mineral team are calling a plant buggy, study crops, soil, and other environmental factors using a mix of cameras, sensors, and other onboard equipment. The team then uses the data collected and combines it with satellite imagery and weather data to create predictive models for how the plants will grow using machine learning and other AI training techniques. The Mineral team says it's already using the prototypes to study soybeans in Illinois and strawberries in California.
"Over the past few years, the plant buggy has trundled through strawberry fields in California and soybean fields in Illinois, gathering high quality images of each plant and counting and classifying every berry and every bean. To date, the team has analyzed a range of crops like melons, berries, lettuce, oilseeds, oats and barley -- from sprout to harvest," reads Mineral's website. Grant says the Mineral team will collaborate with plant breeders and growers, farmers, and other agricultural experts to come up with solutions that are practical and have real-world benefits.
"Just as the microscope led to a transformation in how diseases are detected and managed, we hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown," explains Grant. "Over the last few years my team and I have been developing the tools of what we call computational agriculture, in which farmers, breeders, agronomists, and scientists will lean on new types of hardware, software, and sensors to collect and analyze information about the complexity of the plant world." One of the first of these tools is a new four-wheel rover-like prototype, what the Mineral team are calling a plant buggy, study crops, soil, and other environmental factors using a mix of cameras, sensors, and other onboard equipment. The team then uses the data collected and combines it with satellite imagery and weather data to create predictive models for how the plants will grow using machine learning and other AI training techniques. The Mineral team says it's already using the prototypes to study soybeans in Illinois and strawberries in California.
"Over the past few years, the plant buggy has trundled through strawberry fields in California and soybean fields in Illinois, gathering high quality images of each plant and counting and classifying every berry and every bean. To date, the team has analyzed a range of crops like melons, berries, lettuce, oilseeds, oats and barley -- from sprout to harvest," reads Mineral's website. Grant says the Mineral team will collaborate with plant breeders and growers, farmers, and other agricultural experts to come up with solutions that are practical and have real-world benefits.
California, huh? (Score:2)
<sniff> burnt <sniff> singed <sniff> burnt, burnt, burnt <sniff> possibly smoldering campfire ...
Maybe they should build a robot that can plant trees?
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"Maybe they should build a robot that can plant trees?"
The trees do that themselves.
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The trees do that themselves.
Fake news. Trees can't build robots. They have no arms.
Stop Being Evil (Score:2, Interesting)
How about instead of putting more family farms out of business, why not try to stop being cunts and figure out how to more effectively automate small scale family farms and promote it as a viable life style alternative.
Seriously the only thing you could think of was putting all small farmers out of business to fee more profits to the megacorps, talking about aiming low, real low, disgusting, you lot should be ashamed of yourselves but I suppose that would require something resembling morals.
Well done Googl
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How could you possibly miss "The project is focused on sustainable food production and farming at large scales" and in the article https://www.theverge.com/2020/... [theverge.com]. They are focused on putting mon and pop farm businesses out of business. Large scale farming damages the environment, proven fact. Small scale rotational farming better for the environment, proven fact. Evil is as evil does.
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Large scale farming can also be done by co-ops of family farms, and until the 1970s that was how most large scale farming was done. I realize that co-ops and other "socialist" programs are no longer popular, but if you look at the timing they disappeared at the same time that Monsanto, ADM and the like were no longer content with selling to farmers but wanted to own them as well. It's not a coincidence that many agribusiness executives are funders of the Libertardian movement, or that the astroturf Libert
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"How about instead of putting more family farms out of business, "
It's called 'progress'. We can't live like 100 years ago if we want to feed 8 billion people.
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How about we make fewer people?
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To put this in a still better way, modernizing agriculture means we can feed a given number of people with less land. In the US, a lot of former farmland in places like Massachusetts is reverting to forest because of this technology. If we could apply this in places like Brazil, a lot of existing forest could be saved.
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modernizing agriculture means we can feed a given number of people with less land. [...] If we could apply this in places like Brazil, a lot of existing forest could be saved.
People used to live in forests and NOT cut them down. They planted (or simply encouraged) stuff that could thrive there and then ate it. Modern agriculture involves clearing vast tracts of land so that you can drive machines around on it. What you're saying makes zero sense.
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Hunting and gathering are sustainable only for small poopulations. To feed large populations, we had to move to agriculture. Now that technology is becoming more efficient and requires less land for a given crop.
Meanwhile, the one place we are still hunting and gathering is at sea. This is the one place where human usage is still depleting natural populations. Wde really need to do more of that evil fish farming.
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Modern agriculture involves clearing vast tracts of land so that you can plant crops that have far higher yields which don't grow in shade and don't tolerate root competition.
FTFY
If we're going to live with pre-civilization agriculture then we need to reduce the population to pre-civilization levels. I hope you have invested in a shovel factory, because that's a frack of a lot of graves to dig.
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We are.
Seeing as how most people live for seventy to eighty years, there's some lag in the system.
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It's called 'progress'. We can't live like 100 years ago if we want to feed 8 billion people.
No, but we could grow plants using the same methods used 200 years ago but with modern information. Organic zero-tilth intensive farming produces much more output per acre. It requires more work to be done, but isn't that what robots are for?
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I believe this has been the emphasis on robotized farming in Europe, so far. In order to be competitive organic farms need to reduce their costs, and robots are one of the ways to do that.
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"How about instead of putting more family farms out of business, "
It's called 'progress'. We can't live like 100 years ago if we want to feed 8 billion people.
No 'progress' would be convincing the 1st world to stop being so fucking wasteful with their food.
I'm willing to be we throw away more than other countries survive on.
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figure out how to more effectively automate small scale family farms and promote it as a viable life style alternative.
That's what automation does: it puts people out of work, and then they go on the dole, paid for by state credit and inflation because the megarich fucks who profit the most from automation stash their fortunes in tax havens and don't paid their fair share of taxes.
Technically that's a lifestyle alternative, and it's viable as long as the whole of society constantly gets poorer and poorer because of inflation.
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How about instead of putting more family farms out of business, why not ... figure out how to more effectively automate small scale family farms and promote it as a viable life style alternative.
That's what has been happening for decades. (Often the family farms are the actual engineering innovators, too.) Some organic farms are major players in the area, too.
You just don't hear about it on the more general-audience news media except when an occasional press release from a vendor hits the wires.
yee haw! (Score:2)
I'll wait for the crotch-sniffing model (Score:2)
nft
UP NEXT (Score:2, Funny)
Right after Alphabet's X lab announcement about a Crop-Sniffing Buggy, Alphabet's XXX lab published a press release about a Crotch-Sniffing Buggy.
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they got busted for that. it was a dog in a tinfoil suit.
They've got a long way to catch up to John Deere (Score:2)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view... [ieee.org]
Want a Really Hard Machine Learning Problem? Try Agriculture, Says John Deere Labs
John Deere, the nearly 200-year-old tractor manufacturer, now considers itself a software company
“We are one of the largest users of cloud computing services in the world,” he says. “We are gathering 5 to 15 million measurements per second from 130,000 connected machines globally. We have over 150 million acres in our databases, using petabytes and petabytes [of storage]. We p
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Yeah, in order to catch up to JD they also have to implement DRM for replacement parts so that if you make a trivial repair you have to call the JD-authorized repair guy and give him money to give JD their cut before they will authorize your parts swap.
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Are you under the illusion that Google won't? I'm not.
Deere has over a century of history with farmers. When they started the 'precision agriculture' rollout they allowed farmers to make their own repairs with a certain amount of trepidation. Of course farmers would substitute some cheap piece of crap duct taped in place for a critical part rather than spend slightly more or wait for a warrantee replacement, the thing wouldn't work correctly, and then the farmer would bad-mouth their product. Everyone k
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Yep, farmers complain about it incessantly, but know what? They keep buying Deere products because the return on investment makes it worth the trouble.
They keep buying Deere products because nobody else has the support network. They're a captive audience.
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Massey-Ferguson used to have outlets and repair depots in every rural town, do they not any longer? IIRC New Holland partnered with the Ford dealerships when Ford shut down their tractor operations, so any Ford car dealership could order parts and service for New Holland tractors, is that no longer the case? I haven't spent much time in farming country in the last couple of decades so really don't know any more.